GeForce R275 Drivers Bring New Features and Performance To Gamers

June 1, 2011

By Andrew Burnes

The new GeForce R275 drivers are now WHQL-certified and available for download. Sporting improvements to the NVIDIA Update application, performance increases in numerous games, 3D Vision enhancements, improved monitor scaling, and improved HDTV resizing and scaling, our latest drivers once again advance the capabilities of your video card and your system.

Performance Improvements

Of greatest interest to GeForce users will be the performance improvements for GeForce 400 and 500 series GPUs, compared to our latest driver release, R270. As an example, on the GTX 580, Batman: Arkham Asylum is now up to 14% faster when running at 1920x1200, with 8x Anti-Aliasing, maximum settings, and PhysX set to High; Bulletstorm is now up to 13% faster when running at 1920x1200, with 8x Anti-Aliasing, 16x Anisotropic Filtering and all in-game graphics settings set to max; Portal 2 is up to now 9% faster when running at 2500x1600, with 4x Anti-Aliasing and all in-game graphics settings set to max; Civilization V is now up to 5% when running in SLI at 2560x1600, and with all settings and DirectX 11 goodies set to max; and Crysis 2 is up to now 4% faster when running at 1920x1200, with the graphics settings set to High.

Let’s look at one more example of the performance optimizations, this time on the newly released GeForce GTX 560. Under the same conditions and on the same system hardware, Bulletstorm is now up to 15% faster, Batman: Arkham Asylum is up to 14% faster, Portal 2 is up to 8% faster, and Crysis 2 is up to 6% faster.

Our software team has also increased performance by up to 12% on dual-core CPUs in CPU-limited situations. This was measured in Left 4 Dead 2 with a GTX 580, but the optimization can affect many more games when performance becomes CPU-bottlenecked.

Updates to 3D Vision

In the realm of 3D Vision, Portal 2 is now rated as ‘Excellent,’ thanks to the removal of a water reflection glitch and SLI corruption, meaning you can enjoy a flawless 3D Vision experience when playing Valve’s latest masterpiece in stereoscopic 3D. We’ve also introduced new 3D Vision profiles for the following titles, bringing the total number of profiles to over five hundred - of special note is Duke Nukem Forever’s profile, which is certified 3D Vision Ready, ensuring the best possible 3D Vision experience in the long-awaited first-person shooter:

Age Of Empires Online

Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Battlefield Play4Free

Duke Nukem Forever

Dungeon Siege III

Super Street Fighter IV

World Of Tanks

And finally, the 3D Vision Photo Viewer now works in a window as well as in fullscreen.

NVIDIA Update

NVIDIA Update, the driver notification tool released with our R270 drivers, is now even more useful, in that it can automatically download and install SLI profiles. This means you’ll no longer have to download hotfix releases or separate files from our website when new profiles are released alongside a game as NVIDIA Update will do it for you.

We’ve also added an Updates tab, showing you what NVIDIA Update has downloaded and installed, and providing further details about each.

Control Panel Updates

In the NVIDIA Control Panel we’ve ramped the Adjust Desktop Size and Position page, inserting a new user interface with a preview window and three easy-to-use scaling mode defaults. The page will now be available for all VGA, DVI and HDMI-connected monitors, and you can override games that no longer scale properly on Windows 7, forcing games to use the Control Panel’s scaling.

We’ve revamped the Adjust Desktop Size and Position page for HDTV users, too. Now, HDTV users will be shown how to disable overscanning on their HDTV, but if that’s impossible the Control Panel will create a custom, resized resolution with 1:1 pixel mapping and will automatically resize standard resolutions for games that don’t support custom resolutions.

Bug Fixes

Shortly after the release of the 275.27 beta drivers, NVIDIA identified an issue that caused a significant performance problem in The Witcher 2: Assassins Of Kings. Engineers and technically-minded end users discovered the issue independently after in-depth testing, the results of which can be read in full here. This problem is resolved in the new 275.33 WHQL GeForce drivers, and as one final measure NVIDIA also re-checked performance in other top titles, confirming that the performance problem was an isolated issue that did not affect other games.

A number of other key bugs, identified by the community, have also been fixed. For example:

Flickering in Crysis has been fixed when using a Geforce GTX 295 with multi-GPU mode enabled;

An unusual red and green texturing error in RIFT --caused by watching Flash videos before loading the game-- has been fixed;

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 flickering has been fixed on systems running a GTX 480 or 8800 GTS;

Empire: Total War flickering on Windows Vista systems equipped with 500-series NVIDIA GPUs has been fixed;

Internet Explorer 9 no longer crashes when 3D Vision is enabled;

A performance problem caused by users loading Windows 7 with their monitors set to 120Hz has been fixed;

Resident Evil 5 appearing out of focus on certain systems has been fixed;

And occasional synchronization issues between the 3D Vision emitter, drivers, and glasses have been fixed.

There you have it, another set of NVIDIA GeForce drivers packed with performance improvements, 3D Vision profile updates, and new features. Download them here.